The late Belgian spiritual writer Bieke Vandekerkehove, in a very fine book, The Taste of Silence, shared very honestly about the demons that beset her as she faced a terminal illness at age 19. She singled out three particular demons that tormented her as she faced the prospect of death, sadness, anger and fear, and she suggested that we can more easily cope with sadness and anger than we can with fear. Here鱿鱼视频app her thought:
鈥淪adness can be handled through tears, through grieving. Sadness fills us like a water glass, but a glass can be emptied. Tears can drain sadness of its bite. We have all, no doubt, experienced the release, the catharsis, that can come through tears. Tears can soften the heart and take away the bitterness of sadness, even while its heaviness remains. Sadness, no matter how heavy, has a release valve. So too does anger. Anger can be expressed and its very expression helps release it so that it flows out of us. No doubt too we have also experienced this. The caution, of course, is that in expressing anger and giving it release we need to be careful not to hurt others, which is the ever-present danger when dealing with anger. With anger we have many outlets: We can shout in rage, beat a drum, punch a bag, use profanity, physically exercise until we鈥檙e exhausted, smash some furniture, utter murderous threats and rage away at countless things. This isn鈥檛 necessarily rational and some of these things aren鈥檛 necessarily moral, but they offer some release. We have means to cope with anger.
鈥淔ear, on the other hand, has no such release valves. Most often, there鱿鱼视频app nothing we can do to lighten or release it. 聽Fear paralyses us, and this paralysis is the very thing that robs us of the strength we would need to combat it. We can beat a drum, rage in profanity or cry tears, but fear remains. Moreover, unlike anger, fear cannot be taken out on someone else, even though we sometimes try, by scapegoating. But, in the end, it doesn鈥檛 work. The object of our fear doesn鈥檛 go away simply because we wish it away. Fear can only be suffered. We have to live with it until it recedes on its own. Sometimes, as the Book of Lamentations suggests, all we can do is to put our mouth to the dust and wait. With fear, sometimes all we can do is endure.鈥�
What鱿鱼视频app the lesson in this?聽
In her memoirs, the 鱿鱼视频app poet Anna Akhmatova recounts an encounter she once had with another woman as the two of them waited outside a 鱿鱼视频app prison. Both of their husbands had been imprisoned by Stalin and both of them were there to bring letters and packages to their husbands, as were a number of other women. But the scene was like something out of the existential literature of the absurd. The situation was bizarre. First of all, the women were unsure of whether their husbands were even still alive and were equally uncertain as to whether the letters and packages they were delivering would ever be given to their loved ones by the guards. Moreover, the guards would, without reason, make them wait for hours in the snow and cold before they would collect their letters and packages, and sometimes they wouldn鈥檛 meet the women at all. Still, every week, despite the absurdity of it, the women would come, wait in the snow, accept this unfairness, do their vigil and try to get letters and packages to their loved ones in prison. One morning, as they were waiting, seemingly with no end in sight, one of the women recognized Akhmatova and said to her: 鈥淲ell, you鈥檙e a poet. Can you tell me what鱿鱼视频app happening here?鈥� Akhmatova looked at the woman and replied: 鈥淵es, I can!鈥� And then something like a smile passed between them.
Why the smile? Just to be able to name something, no matter how absurd or unfair, no matter our powerlessness to change it, is to be somehow free of it, above it, transcendent in some way. To name something correctly is to partly free ourselves of its dominance. That鱿鱼视频app why totalitarian regimes fear artists, writers, religious critics, journalists and prophets. They name things. That鱿鱼视频app ultimately the function of prophecy. Prophets don鈥檛 foretell the future, they properly name the present. Richard Rohr is fond of saying, 鈥淣ot everything can be fixed or cured, but it should be named properly.鈥� James Hillman has his own way of casting this. He suggests that a symptom suffers most when it doesn鈥檛 know where it belongs.
This can be helpful in dealing with fear in our lives. Fear can render us impotent. But naming that properly, recognizing where that symptom belongs and how powerless it leaves us, can help us to live with it, without sadness and anger.
(Fr. Rolheiser can be reached at ronrolheiser.com.)